Datarella – Lessons Learned: Hire Slow – Fire Fast

A lot of entrepreneurs hire fast and fire slow. In particular when new coders are required to develop a software. A bias towards speed and quick growth drives many leaders to be quick to hire new personnel and strategic cooperation partners. Hiring fast is absolutely fine as long as everything works out well. The problem is, many people do not react quick enough when they figure out problems and significant quality issues with the people they cooperate with.

Datarella decided to hire a German-based software development team for the programming of the prototype app including a backend system. The team had good references and offered us their service at an attractive price. The introductory meeting was very promising. It was clear to hire them quickly.

Over the course of time, we figured out that the development team lost one of their key persons, who supported us on our project. As a result, they stopped hitting the pre-defined milestones and started to deliver poor quality. Firstly, we asked them to take care of the problems they obviously had within their team. Secondly, we put them under pressure to deliver in time. However, our development partner was not able to improve his performance. As a consequence, we decided to quit our agreement and to hire a new development team. Probably we should have done so much earlier…

If you figure out any problems with your staff or partners, react quickly and if worst comes to worst you need to fire fast.